I've received an email from Symantec advertising 'Norton Ghost 9.0'.
Symantec states that it is an advanced program which offers a backup
to the computer and gives protection. It sounds interesting but costs
£29 and I wonder if it is worth using Norton Ghost.

Does anyone have any experience of this program? I would value any
comments.

Many thanks.
Regards,

Chas_G

Chas_G wrote:
It's a multicast ghosting application that allows you to "ghost" disk
images from one PC to another, and take backup images from PC's, it has
other function too.

"gives protection" - not sure about that one.

regards
c0ntex

Chas_G wrote:
Ghost, like other disk imaging programs, is indispensable, if you want
to make sure you have a reliable disaster recovery option. I personally
use Acronis True Image. Regardless of which product you choose, a disk
imaging program is worth every pence you pay for it. Open your check
book and buy it.

Ghost is wonderful.

We use it for deployment. Build one image and every PC you/ve bought
only takes a few minutes to hotload. When the PC crashes, it takes
only a few minutes to restore.

We use it in the test grop, because for some reason, I can't
understand why, the software releases we do just seem to
crash.....With ghost, the previous test image can be recreated in a
few minutes so the crash can be easily duplicated and investigated.

Sometimes we get evaluation software with timeouts, and it takes
longer than the timeout to do the testing. Using Ghost, we just
restore the image then reload the test software. It's easier than
calling the company and trying to get a time extension.

We use it on NTFS and FAT.

Rock


On Thu, 19 May 2005 12:10:02 +0100, Chas_G
<chasg@DELETE_THIS.elmstead.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

On Thu, 19 May 2005 12:10:02 +0100, Chas_G
<chasg@DELETE_THIS.elmstead.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

practically indispensable as a backup tool.
As regards protection, it only does so by allowing you to create
storable archives of your drives/partitions, as well as being able to
copy entire disks or partitions on the fly.

As an aside, if you were thinking about upgrading your machine, many
motherboard manufacturers bundle Ghost as a freebie..so you could
consider it as £30 off the price of a new motherboard....

Regards,



--
Stephen Howard - Woodwind repairs & period restorations
www.shwoodwind.co.uk
Emails to: showard{whoisat}shwoodwind{dot}co{dot}uk

Chas_G <chasg@DELETE_THIS.elmstead.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in
news:40to8114mquc5fcc9jm5j8bfnj3dibdo2v@4ax.com:


For convenience, I prefer the Acronis product. However, for fine-grained
control (especially from the command line version) nothing beats Norton
Ghost.

I haven't used Ghost 9 - as near as I can tell it's an attempt to catch up
with some of the convenience features of Acronis (e.g., live backup while
working, mounting of a backup image as a virtual drive, etc.). However, it
appears to suffer somewhat from the classic Symantec problem: bloat.

Ghost 8.2 from diskettes (remember those?) with lots of switches is what I
use to back up encrypted OTFE HDs (switches for MBR preservation, etc.)

Regards,

Rock wrote:

For development work with applications Instead of ghost I recommend for
test purposes, a package called VMware. You can recover from a system
crash by closing the VM. To restore the system to virgin takes only
seconds. To create a group of virgins on the same machine to emulate
multiple network functionalities is a breeze and runs all MS OS packages
and Linux very well. You can do both NTFS disks or fat disks either in
RAM or on drives attached to the system. If you never have looked at
this as an alternative to ghost you should for development, it is so
sweet to test apps with various common application and configuration
variances looking for conflicts. It has the added advantage of being to
keep multiple point in time builds that can be examined interactively at
the same time on the same machine. I believe they still have 30 day
eval packages. It was the best $200 software package I have ever bought.

If you are writing drivers or other low level type apps then it probably
is not a great option, but most everything else..it rocks.

It is nice to be able to build against all of the various MS OS packages
at the same time on the same machine. While the more memory the system
has increase the number of simultaneous VMs you can run, it is amazing
what you can run in as little as 512mb ram on at 2GHZ. As with
everything more is always better but it is nice to keep your prog
machine up while running prog build in separate vm dynamically. I can't
address their customer support, I have never used them.

I have got to the point where almost everything I do is inside a custom
VM designed for the task at hand, even the routine.

Winged

Many thanks to all those who kindly responded. Much appreciated!
Regards,

Chas_G

Yeah, Winged, we evaluated VMWare, but mostly they are too
hardware-limited. I mean, only recently did they decide to support
USB, and 1394 isn't on the horizon yet.

They have a problem with any DMA host controller, they need special
stuff to make sure the target of the DMA goes to the right VM. I
dunno if they support sata yet, I doubt it.

Their support of Serial is really poor. Ah yes, but who uses serial
anymore? Winbag, that's who.

Their support of GART is pretty poor. I don't think there's any video
card that's fully supported.

We never tried soft-ice on vmware. But I suspect it has problems.

I'd stick to VMWare for it's intended application: production
servers.

Rock

On Thu, 19 May 2005 21:52:39 -0500, Winged <Winged@nofollow.com>
wrote:

In article <Xns965B6510955D0abcxyzcom@127.0.0.1>, abc@xyz.com says...
it intolerable as a backup. I used Dantz Retrospect Pro instead.

Then I wanted to have full disk images and bought Ghost 9. To my
surprise, because I'm not too fond of symantec anymore, Ghost 9 is an
excellent program.

You can clone a disk. You can also create a drive image and then Ghost
will divide that image into small enough parts to enable you to burn it
to DVDs, or even CDs, along with a burn to an external hard drive.

It is also very easy (and even user friendly), to restore a particular
file or folder.

Louise

Louise <none@nospam.com> wrote in
news:MPG.1d216b2e5827595498977a@news.newsguy.com:

Thanks for the update.

Regards,

Louise wrote:

You can probably thank the developers of Drive Image (PowerQuest), who
were acquired by Symantec in December 2003. A lot of that product's
capabilities were folded into Ghost.